Trends in Packaging

Building on familiar demands, package design and packaging lines will evolve to address the need for automation, sustainability, consumer convenience, product safety and rising consumer interest in health and wellness. Food safety also is a top-of-mind concern. Tainted products have been implicated in recent deaths and illnesses in China and Japan. In 2006, Cadbury Schweppes recalled more than 1 million chocolate bars from UK stores due to Salmonella contamination, and dozens died in Latin America after ingesting diethylene glycoltainted cough syrup.

Packagers are scrutinizing their supply chains, process controls and quality assurance practices with new intensity. Although packagers may want to increase automation, and deliver products that are sustainable, convenient and healthy, economics ultimately will determine the level of investment in package design and packaging line equipment.

Automation
Reliance on automation will increase throughout the 2008-2010 time period to address needs to increase efficiency and quality and cut costs. Manual operations are being automated, and automated operations are looking for ways to boost productivity, while cutting costs and labor requirements. This is translating into a strong interest in entry-level equipment to help automate manual operations, reduce or control labor costs, improve working conditions and eliminate ergonomic hazards.

For operations that have already made the transition to automated equipment, the need to increase productivity and control costs is spurring demand for flexible machines that are easier to clean, change over, operate and maintain. It’s also prompting greater use of servos, networks (especially wireless), radio frequency identification (RFID) and robotics.

There’s also a strong interest in outsourcing, especially in the food industry. According to a 2007 Food Packaging Trends Study by Food Engineering magazine, 32 percent of respondents rely on contract packagers to reduce time to market for new products, double the percentage using this strategy in 2003.

Respondents to the survey classify robotics as the most noteworthy development in packaging technology, and a signifi cant number would like to install more. Palletizing is the most common packaging application for robots, followed by case/carton packaging and pickand- place activities.

With 77 percent of the packagers surveyed planning to use more robots, penetration on packaging lines should double from about one-fourth in 2007 to roughly one-half by 2012 in major segments including food and beverage. A growing number of these new units will be equipped with vision to reduce the need for fi xturing, increase flexibility to accommodate different products and expedite changeover.

Increasingly, the enabler on packaging lines is software. Not only does it govern machine action, but it also controls setup and interaction— with other machines, the network and beyond to other enterprise systems and even to systems run by supply chain partners. Whatever its purpose, software makes it possible to collect, store and organize packaging machine and line data and convert it into useful, retrievable and actionable information. Increasingly, this information is available remotely via a web portal. Other tools can provide real-time alerts if preset parameters are exceeded.

RFID, a technology that automates product identification and enables item-level serialization for supply chain, track and trace and other purposes, will continue its steady expansion due to an unwavering commitment to tagging of incoming goods by huge retailers.

Sustainability
There will be an especially keen interest related to source reduction such as lightweighting containers and closures, eliminating secondary packaging, and replacing rigid with flexi-packaging. Source reduction is an easy target because it not only consumes less material but also cuts costs throughout the supply chain by reducing shipping weight.

One of the most frequently employed tactics to shrink a product’s environmental footprint, source reduction involves lightweighting or downgauging and using less material in the first place. As a result, it almost always helps packagers cut costs or offset price increases. The potential for energy savings also makes the use of materials with recycled content attractive since virgin materials require more energy to process. Thus, we’ll see slowly rising percentages of recycled content across all types of packaging materials—glass, aluminum, steel, paper, paperboard, corrugated, plastic—with the most signifi cant gains in plastics like PET where efforts to increase collection rates seem likely to bear fruit.

Interest in packaging materials derived from renewable resources will grow, particularly in the area of bioplastics where commercial-scale production facilities are coming online and functionality is improving. We also can expect growth in flexible packaging and aseptic products, which hold a high volume of product relative to the amount of packaging required. In addition, aseptic products offer the added benefit of reducing the need for energy-intensive refrigeration.

Short-skirt closures typically reduce total container weight by a gram or two. Not only does the closure itself weigh less, but the designs reduce the amount of resin needed in the fi nish area of the container. When multiplied by millions of containers and closures, even small weight reductions add up to a signifi cant amount of resin and can help control or even reduce packaging and distribution costs. In addition, if the lighter weight results in a denser cube, it also can generate savings in distribution packaging and shipping and handling costs due to more effi cient transportation utilization and reduced handling.

Replacing virgin content with recycled saves energy, reduces waste and cuts greenhouse gas emissions. In the UK, Innocent Ltd uses a 250 ml, 100-percent recycled PET (RPET) bottle for its ready-to-drink, refrigerated smoothies, and GlaxoSmithKline specifi es a 500 ml RPET bottle for its Ribena fruit drinks.

On the packaging line, switching from a virgin PET to an RPET container should require few, if any, adjustments. However, injection molding or sheet/fi lm extrusion may necessitate additives to improve processability and properties as well as special drying and fi ltration equipment. Even then, the RPET packaging may exhibit slightly diminished physical properties like intrinsic viscosity, tensile strength, light transmission, haze and clarity. It also should be noted that widespread use of 100-percent RPET packaging will require substantially a higher collection and recycling rate for PET containers than the current recycling rates achieved today.

Convenience and safety
Although an AC Nielsen Global Food Packaging Survey indicates nearly half of the respondents are willing to give up convenience packaging to benefit the environment, one wonders if these good intentions are actually carried at the cash register. Food Engineering magazine found that food processors believe convenience rules, ranking third behind product shelf life and food safety as the force with the greatest impact on their business.

A seemingly endless succession of food recalls, a signifi cant level of counterfeiting worldwide, and the possibility of terrorist attacks by tainted consumer product have left consumers uneasy and consumer packaged goods companies trying to identify and mitigate risks. In fact, food safety tops the list of concerns cited by food processors when asked what factors would influence new package development.

As a result, packagers will institute more stringent requirements for suppliers of packaging equipment, materials, containers and other components. Suppliers will be expected to certify they are shipping the highest quality product and demonstrate that they have effective measures in place to ensure their incoming goods are clean and contaminant-free and that their process prevents introduction of any contaminants.

Heightened concern about product safety will prompt increased use of track-and-trace technologies like serialized bar coding and RFID. It also will encourage adoption of anti-counterfeiting tools like holographic labels, micro-printing and taggant-equipped packaging.

On the packaging line, greater attention will be paid to washdown compatibility and hygienic design, which eliminates areas that could collect dirt or product residue as well as features like automated clean-in-place and easy assembly and disassembly of product contact parts. Cleanliness-enhancing design not only helps protect product quality, but also minimizes man hours needed for line changeover and cleanup.

Packagers will install more quality-control equipment like X-ray inspectors, metal detectors, near-infrared inspection systems and vision systems to help minimize the chance of faulty product entering the supply chain. There also will be increased use of rapid detection systems for contaminants like Listeria and E. coli.

Concerns about food safety and the increased emphasis on fresh food will prompt greater use of labels and tags that provide a visual indicator of freshness and purity. Some of these include time-temperature indicator labels, which have been available for approximately two decades, and newer options such as RFID tags capable of monitoring temperatures, and labels that detect the presence of spoilage organisms or pathogens.

Health and wellness
With obesity seen as a major health problem in much of the developed world, skyrocketing healthcare demand and costs and the aging baby boomer population, interest in products that address health issues will continue to rise. Consumers today want more nutritional information.

As a result, the marketplace is seeing more products with lower salt, fat and sugar levels, more single-serving, portion-controlled packs, demand for more product information, greater emphasis on fresh products and reduction in the use of artificial additives and preservatives. In addition to limiting salt, fat, sugar, calories, preservatives and artificial ingredients, food and beverage makers are introducing more functional products like pre- and probiotics and developing offerings that simplify preparation of balanced meals and improve the nutritional profile of grab-and-go foods and beverages. Reduction in ingredients with preservative qualities may necessitate conversion to packaging with higher barrier properties such as barrier laminations and coextrusions, metallized or foil-based structures and “smart” packages with an active component like an oxygen scavenger.

On fill-seal and form-fi ll-seal machines, changes in flexible packaging materials may require adjustments in dwell time and sealing, as well as a shift to more sophisticated quality control equipment like metal detectors and leak testers. As a result, there has been a proliferation of single-portion snacks and side dishes in small pouches or rigid containers. Since many single-serving products rely on pouch packaging, food processors will need to increase capacity by adding vertical form-fi ll-seal machines and flow wrappers.

Food processors also are likely to install more thermoform-fi ll-seal units to package products like single-serving applesauce, stick pack machines for dry mixes and liquid fillers capable of handling small bottles.

Photos (pg 16 & 18 topmost) courtesy of Interpack 2008

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